Do You Have a Personal Ghost Story? I do!

Our first show of the Fall season is coming up in two weeks. In preparing for the event, a “Haunted Travel Guide to Indiana” on September 30th, it got me thinking about the few experiences I have had when… well, let’s just say… things didn’t seem quite right.

My family and I first moved to Crown Point when I was in high school. Having grown up and lived in the same home all of my life, moving to a new house feels strange in itself. It takes time to adjust to a new house and new surroundings. Our neighbors did a great job of welcoming us and would often have us over for dinner. It was on one of these occasions they shared with us that the previous owner had claimed the house was haunted.

Such stories are easy to dismiss until you start having your own experience when things just don’t seem to add up? At the time, we had the sweetest, friendliest dog you could imagine. One night when I was bringing her in from outside, she stopped, looked across into the corner of one of the bedrooms, and started growling. To say this was odd is an understatement. I didn’t even know our dog could growl! I told her to come with me, but she continued to stare into that corner and growl. At the time, I dismissed this as her having seen an unfamiliar shadow from some object in the room. But, this happened more than once and at different times in the day.

On days it rained, I would roll an old basketball to her in the basement. We always kept this basketball in the same spot on top of a brown cabinet. It was always there. We never had to look for it until the one day it when it went missing. We searched everywhere in that basement and through the house and asked everyone if they had seen it. After weeks of looking for it, I assumed it was gone forever. That is until the day it returned… back to the top of the cabinet. Would someone have moved it? Maybe, but they would have remembered doing so.

One last experience happened while packing to go back to college. My sister went to get some of my shirts from the laundry room for me. My door was closed but I heard her walking down the hall. The hallway made definite creaking sounds. I went to open up the door and… you guessed it… there was no one there. My sister was still in the laundry room and the rest of the family had been in the living room. I know I heard someone in the hallway. It was such a distinct sound. That was not my imagination.

Or was it? That’s why I like ghost stories! Something happens that we can’t explain and for a moment we are open to the possibility of the paranormal. But, our logical minds will soon find an explanation for what doesn’t make sense. So, maybe the dog is just barking at shadows? Maybe I did forget where I had put the ball? Maybe I didn’t hear the footsteps? Or… maybe ghosts DO exist.

In our two upcoming shows, Mark Marimen will relate many the many accounts from the actual eye witnesses to real hauntings here in Indiana. Having written 7 books on the subject, Mark is uniquely qualified to identify Indiana’s most haunted locations. But, unlike the few stories I related above, these stories are much more difficult to dismiss. Objects float, disembodied voices are heard and apparitions appear!

Join us on September 30th and decide for yourself what is real and what is imagined. For more information, see the event details here. You can also purchase your tickets online from this site.